Battery Life

[scottr]

First and foremost this is a great app for an unbelievable price.

I use this application on a iPod Touch gen 2 and have noticed that the battery seems to last about 2 hour game and then needs to be recharged. My son had a double header this weekend and I had to recharge it between games.

I know this is not a application issue more of a hardware issue. From what I read on hardware forums it is because of the extensive use of the touch screen.

I was just wondering if anyone has seen the same results on their iPod/iPhone.

[wrast]

I have an original iPhone (no 3G). I scored 2 complete games yesterday and most of a 3rd game before I decided my battery was too low and stopped using iScore. It turned out I needed to be able to score a 4th game as well but there was no way that was going to happen. I'm thinking I might pick up one of the Mophie juice packs to handle this kind of situation. Another thought is to turn on airplane mode on the phone to try and preserve battery life. But in that case you can't receive phone calls (or use the future GameCast feature presumably).

I believe most of the battery gets used just in having the screen active and not the use of the touchscreen. I tried to deactivate my screen as much as I could whenever I saw a delay in the game and that seemed to help (mainly between 1/2 innings).

[FTMSupport]

@Scottr

If you could only score 1 game before running low on batteries, something is definitely wrong. We have tested on both iPhones and iPod Touch 2g's on countless occassions (our developers have been scoring games since we began developing the App), and have scored many double headers and even a 3rd game on the same day without requiring a recharge.

One thing to check --- if you have Gamecast enabled, that will be a battery hog. That attempts to send play by play data to our servers, and using WiFi is very battery intensive. Gamecast is something we have built in for future use (being able to view games live as they are played from a website), but really is not useful right now, so it should be turned off on the Options screen if you have it on.

If that option is not on, it sounds like your battery may be starting to not last as long. I'm not sure how Apple handles that (happens with any rechargeable battery over time), but if anyone else has been able to find a way to check battery capabilities, we would love to hear about it.

[Chris]

I have an iPhone 3G and one of the things I do when scoring a game (or a doubleheader) is turn OFF the 3G network (Settings -> General -> Network -> Enable 3G) cuz I've heard in other places that the 3G network uses lots of power. This seems to help improve battery power a lot and I've made it thru doubleheaders without a problem. I also have a add-on battery with me if I need it.

[suttio]

With the original iPhone (a year and a half old) we are able to score both games of a double header. I highly recommend you turn off the WI-Fi like we did and it seems to make a huge difference. You may also try to lower the screen brightness. Another thing that seems to help us the 10 run rule. Now if only we knew how to be on the better end of that rule.

[sportsdoc]

So far, I have been able to score 2 games in a row as well as some fictious situation games without problems.
Anything else that you may have turned on in your settings menu (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc)?

Doc

[cherrybomb]

I have a touch 2G and I noticed the battery was going down quickly, though I didn't really use it for much besides setting up the game. Just realizing now that the wifi was on, and so it would have been searching for a signal all day. Hoping the battery life won't be a problem, we had 3 games each sat and sun for our tournament.

[phender]

I was scoring (1) games yesterday on my iphone and by the 6th inning the charge was gone. I have seen external batteries for the iphone (after market) and will probably buy one. It was a real drag when about the 5th inning the program started acting weired than a few batters later the "iphone warning came" - indicating the battery was less than 20%.

[phender]

CHRIS where did you purchase you extra battery for the iphone?

[FTMSupport]

@phender - make sure Gamecast is turned OFF on the Options screen. This will use a lot more battery power, and does not really give any added benefit (yet). We have noticed several customers have Gamecast on (we see the data coming to our severs), but until we have a web site set up to use the data, it does not add anything to have it turned ON.